Bernie Sanders is not the first old white man to make a run for the White House, obviously.
In the Huffington Post, writer and Hofstra University teacher Alan Singer compares Frederick Douglass’s beliefs on race with those of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
Douglas lived in Rochester for many years, and published the abolitionist newspaper The North Star from the basement of a Rochester church. It was in Rochester on July 4, 1852, that Douglas delivered a fiery speech about the state of the union:
“What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
In the present day, Sanders has spoken bluntly about the history of racism and violence in U.S. history. On the country’s history of slavery, Sanders said the U.S. “in many ways was created, and I’m sorry to have to say this, from way back, on racist principles, that’s a fact.” In the New York Times, Princeton University History Professor Sean Wilentz wrote in response that Sanders’s rhetoric “threatens to poison the current presidential campaign.”
And in Sanders’s quest to highlight rising income inequality in the U.S., the candidate has paradoxically enlisted the support of 128 celebrity millionaires. It’s easy to see why: in a study of 178 athletic endorsements with 95 companies, sales went up by $10 million on average following endorsements. Even so, the impact of celebrity endorsements on political campaigns is less clear; however, one study did find that Oprah positively influenced Obama’s favorability ratings in 2008.
As a self-confessed socialist in a contest dominated by a self-obsessed capitalist, Sanders also offers a sharp contrast to Donald Trump mania. Even with the election more than a year away, Republican candidates like Trump and Dr. Ben Carson have angered millions on the left with xenophobic comments about immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, and more. At the same time, Sanders has infuriated many on the right with his statements on U.S. race relations.
In just the past week, Trump failed to correct a man who called President Barack Obama a Muslim, and Carson said that it would be wrong to elect a Muslim president.
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